


time, mystical time (cutting me open then healing me fine)

by 26stars



Series: Fall Prompts 2020 [7]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Childhood Trauma, Hurt/Comfort, Intimacy, Kissing each other's scars, M/F/F triad, Multi, Not really sexytimes but implied nudity, Polyamory, Psychological Trauma, Reference to abuse from a parent, References to childhood injury/surgery, References to several canon injuries, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:46:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26856907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: Fitz, Jemma, and Daisy's lives have been marked by traumas and their bodies by scars. When they come together though, there's only tenderness for both.Birthday fic for Florchis <3
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons/Skye | Daisy Johnson
Series: Fall Prompts 2020 [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1931209
Comments: 7
Kudos: 27





	time, mystical time (cutting me open then healing me fine)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Florchis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florchis/gifts).



> Fills the Fall prompt 'scars' and also my femslash bingo square 'sympathy'
> 
> Flor, I'm so thankful for you! You're a great friend and shipping pal and and an amazing writer--the fandom is lucky to have you! Hope you enjoy this even though it's a little ouch.

When Fitz was in second year, a bigger classmate pushed him off the monkey bars. The fall on a bad angle with his bodyweight’s falling velocity behind it snapped his arm in two places, and Fitz had worn a cast for eight weeks. The second time he broke the same arm, he only remembered seven of those casted-up weeks because he spent the first in a coma. Throughout his years, the arm would ache distantly whenever a storm gathered, whether he could see it forming in the sky or not. He never mentioned it to anyone, just like he never mentioned the scar on his lower back from the time his father let him feel what the buckle of a belt felt like. At the time, it was a warning. To his mother, it had been the whistle.

Jemma clearly remembered her scoliosis surgery, but her memories of its tedious recovery were padded with better ones of learning about the stars with her father. She was young enough when it happened that the scar was a muted line up her spine by the time she entered the Academy. By then, she had also earned a splash-burn on the back of one hand from a careless lab partner and a line in her palm from her own mistake of gathering the pieces of a broken beaker into one hand.

A few years later, she had a rib broken by a hammer moved by an Inhuman’s mind. The next year, a robot who looked like the man she loved stabbed her through the calf.

The last one took the longest to heal for more than one reason.

When Daisy was still Skye, she accumulated plenty of scars, though none where people could see. Her worldview was shaped by loss, rejection, and detachment, but she did her best to mask it with confidence and smiles for anyone she cared to impress. Those people were initially just the Rising Tide and its resulting boyfriend, and then, so suddenly, it was everyone in her life, starting the moment she joined up with SHIELD. The spaces inside designed to receive love, spaces nearly decaying in disuse, suddenly had to stretch again, had to remember how to yield, how to risk the potential of loss by loving deeply again. It ached to stretch, but only inside.

On the outside, she started to accumulate scars from violence that now usually came for her in the form of bullets, often fired by people she knew. A millionaire following orders, two friends replaced by robots…even once by the woman who had been her S.O. Aliens put a device in her neck and a man she loved ripped it out, and all of those things left wounds that needed more time than her body did to heal.

When the three of them came together in the beginning, they’d had fewer scars. They grew together and separately, pulled apart and reunited a half-a-dozen ways, and each time one came back, they brought some new trauma with them. Wounds that needed tending, but not from doctors.

Jemma, the one who had doctored most of Daisy’s wounds anyway, was usually the one to initiate it, kissing the scars across Daisy’s neck and shoulders, down her arm, lingering over her stomach, dipping down to her leg…Fitz would follow behind her and hold Daisy tight, never able to forget which wound he’d once opened, which one his likeness had left on Jemma… Jemma would move up to embrace Daisy’s front, and Fitz would reach around Daisy to hold the hand whose scars he’d memorized years before he touched, and Daisy would trace the line from Jemma’s neck to hips before reaching down and finding the place on Jemma’s leg where she’d once wrapped a bandage before pulling her to her feet to fight through a gauntlet of robots that Fitz had helped build…

He didn’t have half the visible marks to show for their years. All of his were internal—blown connections, a fragmented personality, memories of a dark life that had never been real, a leftover voice that was his own but could never be allowed to speak…

Daisy would call their pasts _experience_ , a word that didn’t sound like her own, but Jemma called it _surviving_ , and Fitz always thought that word fit better. It wasn’t shiny and polished; it sounded as grim as their years had sometimes felt. They’d had plenty on their shoulders throughout those wars—few of the battles they’d fought had been to save only their own lives. Now, with years of chaos survived, they could finally just…live.

Breathe a little deeper.

Heal.

Time held no loyalties, and as relative as it could feel, it was as faithful as the tides. Each day carried them a greater distance from the worst things, let darkness be overshadowed by kinder things. Each week closed their scars a little better, relaxed their fists a little looser, let them sleep a little deeper. There would always be the jump-scare of trauma poking its head out of the floorboards every so often—a sound here, a smell there, a word spoken that would send one of them snapping back in time to the source of a wound, holding themselves up until the other two came to hold them too…

But thanks to time, the space between those incidences would always be getting a little bigger. Panic’s window would be a little shorter, the recovery a tiny bit faster.

Scars were memorials of pain, but they were also testaments of healing. Something had always been lost, and something else had been gained (though the trade was rarely even). Fitz had tried to put numbers and variables to it before, tried to form a triangular equation of the ways the three of them complemented each other, compensated for losses, filled in each others’ negative space…

Of course it couldn’t be quantified. But it could be received.

With open hands. Scars and all.


End file.
